Thursday, 30 July 1998

The wrongs done our
aboriginal population by the English are myriad. We know about stolen land and
children, murdered tribes and disease. Many other abuses go uncatalogued. Ray
Mooney's play, The Drover's Boy, deals with one.

Last century, drovers travelled with flocks over vast tracts
of the outback. It was illegal for black women to 'fraternise' with white men,
so drovers who were attached to an aboriginal woman took her on the track
dressed as a 'drover's boy'. Was this abuse or genuine attachment?

Mooney's play began in 1985 as a one-acter which director
Peter Oyston combined with others by Jack Davis and Jennifer Playnter. Its
characters appeared in Black Rabbit (Playbox 1988) but it has taken 13 years
for The Drover's Boy to be staged.

Archie, the seasoned drover, (Jim Daly) travels with his
flock accompanied by callow youth, Stanley (Wilde Mooney) and Jackey, an
aboriginal 'boy' (Pauline Whyman) They cook, yarn and tease. Archie teaches
Stanley about the wild and tells him stories of the tribes.

They listen to the wild life, stop mid-sentence to watch an
owl, listen to a dingo, stare at a snake. Time is elastic. The night seems
endless. The space is enormous, the light is startling and the land is dry and
ominous.

Their quiet world changes radically when Macca, (John
Brumpton) the racist violent drover hunting for a sheep thief, invades.

The Drover's Boy is a worthy work. The script, like a Bertholt
Brecht play, is didactic, educating us without involving us in the victims'
emotional torment. Mooney peppers the play with poetic language, snatches of
drover's songs, rhymes and old Aussie slang.

My reservations are that the narrative leaves us craving
more information about the 'boy' and there is a too sudden dramatic leap
towards the end, although this does lift the level of dramatic tension.

Daly plays Archie with an edge of lunacy and as Jackey,
Whyman is engaging. Brumpton brings a whiff of danger and Wilde Mooney, the
writer's teenage son, makes a fine debut as the ingenuous Stanley.

Director, Greg Carroll, takes risks, sometimes
unsuccessfully. The style is inconsistent with some awkward moments but the
sense of the wildness of the environment is strong, enhanced by Joe Dolce's
soundscape and the splashing of real rain through the old roof of the
Athenaeum.

Tuesday, 28 July 1998

"We want theatre
to have a sexy future not just a noble past." Liz Jones, Artistic
Director of Melbourne's precious theatre institution, La Mama in Carlton,
voiced the desire of theatre workers who devoted two days to devising a five
year plan for the Victorian theatre industry.

One resolution proposed that we be called a "theatre
community" not "industry" :a term used to legitimise artists in
a world committed to 'product', financial outcomes and economic rationalism.

The sense of isolation experienced by theatre artists is
merely a microcosm of our society. People feel undervalued and insecure in
workplaces, face redundancies, unreasonable hours, short contracts and
alienating work environments. The wider community is experiencing the insecure
lifestyle which artists have endured their entire working lives but to go any
further into insecurity would be the death of the arts.

With the new philistinism that seems to be creeping into our
politics, theatre workers are having to defend themselves against those
calling, "Why give you money? What use is theatre?"

A country is defined by its social and cultural policy. The
latter predetermines who is subsidised. With the shrinking arts funding pie we
have lost our best middle-level theatre companies. Actors are out there hunting
for waiter jobs - probably competing with their administrators.

State and federal funds still go to state theatre companies via
the Australia Council's Major Organisations Fund and Arts Victoria. Individual
projects are still funded. However, the middle ground has been eroded and
companies that provided work for theatre artists and an exciting alternative to
major companies, are in hibernation.

Theatre has its own eco-system. Its parts are
interdependent. Mainstream companies are worried that this may diminish the
development of new audiences for their own work: a trickle-up negative effect.

A huge marketing push is needed to inform the general
population that theatre is not just for the elite. Yes. It is a risk. New
plays, unlike movies, do not have the advantage of runs all over the world and
$20 million budgets. But the beauty of the theatre is its immediacy. You can
see and hear the actors. In some cases you are so close you could touch them,
hear them breath, see them sweat.

Every night is different and you, as audience, are part of
the equation. Unlike film, without you, the show does not exist. It can
transport you in a way nothing else can. Remember, theatre stems from mystical,
ritualistic and religious canons.

Few other industries need to constantly justify themselves
as does theatre. It is exhausting. We need a catch cry "Theatre is
sexy!" or "Go to a Show!" Playwright, John Romeril, suggests a
"Go to a Show Week".

Melbourne needs to relish and promote its extraordinary
theatre scene. It is unlike any other city in the country. Huge musicals are
not the key to our identity. The diversity of our theatres, the proliferation
of small companies, unusual shows , street theatre, festivals and quirky venues
is what makes Melbourne's theatre scene idiosyncratic.

It is the fact that, in any one week, there are 6-8 new
Australian productions opening unlike any other city in the country, in fact,
the world. It is not the blockbuster musical which, as Kennett suggested, will
make Melbourne the third "theatre city" after London and New York.

The five year plan includes resolutions such as developing a
Theatre Centre which provides not only master training for actors as does the
Actors' Centre in Sydney, but a whole administrative infrastructure for smaller
companies an individual artists and houses a Peak Body to argue for the
survival of the industry.

Theatre needs to reach more people so touring must be
further fostered. Cheaper ticket prices for industry members and students would
help keeps theatres alive and attract new young audiences.

The forging of relationships with local governments will
provide a new source of funding and venues and enable theatre to go back into
specific communities. This is reminiscent of the heyday of Community Theatre
but in a new modern form.

Diversity is what makes Melbourne special. Why not sell this
to the tourists? "See ten shows in five days. Visit the Playhouse, La
Mama, a garage in Footscray, a cupboard in Fitzroy - and see great
theatre."

"We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We
already see so much," demonstrates the simplicity of Walser's poetic
vision. Stanley is the perfect representation of the humble, peculiar and
hilarious voice of the writer.

Disconnected writings join seamlessly in this adaptation by
Stanley in conjunction with Wayne Macauley and director, Adrian Guthrie who has
returned after a 20 year absence. His work in the 70's with Stanley and others
at Claremont Theatre was part of Melbourne's early experimental theatre.

The performance is stripped bare and so is Stanley. When the
piece begins, he is crouching cramped in a tin tub in an almost Munch-like
silent scream. His mad grin and odd physical antics punctuate Walser's naive
and poignant words. His timing is impeccable and his quirky delivery adds an
ironic note to the lilting music of the text.

There is a sweet sadness in Stanley's simple fool who is
reminiscent of Geoffrey Rush's character in Diary of a Madman. Stanley has
always been Melbourne's answer to Sydney's Oscar-winning Rush but has remained
inexplicably undiscovered.

He is the perfect charming clown - and I do not mean fuzzy
orange wig and white face. His past work has always been exceptional,
unpredictable and on the cutting edge. In one show, he scampered about naked
then let loose a dozen stray dogs amongst the audience. In a gallery show, he
required people to pay with a cheque that bounced. He was known on the comedy
circuit as "The Comedian's Comedian" for his character Howard Slowly.

The man in the bath-tub pre-empts a later reference to a
writer who lived in a woman's bathroom. He attends a job interview - naked -
from his tub. He searches for a room, seeks romance with a potential land-lady,
marvels at women's legs, their desire to wear trousers and to vote:
"Voting so boring!"

He jitters about his ageing and his nervousness. He
acknowledges his weirdness. He dresses coyly, behind a striped sheet, adding
silk shirt, vest and jacket in his journey from tub to poetic visionary.
Walser's words reflect his warmth, his childlike joy, his love of the landscape
and, tragically, his own later madness.

Friday, 24 July 1998

"Liar, liar. Pants on fire!" Everybody lies in
English playwright, Patrick Marber's Closer. Like his chronic gamblers in
Dealer's Choice, they are all out of control but in Closer the lack of control
relates to love..

Dan (Marco Chiappi), a needy, aspiring novelist who writes
obituaries, meets Alice, (Asher Keddie) a brazen 20 year-old stripper, when she
walks into London traffic without looking. This is how she lives her life.

Anna, (Jane Menelaus) a stylish photographer, meets Dan when
she takes his publicity shot for his soon-to-fail novel. Larry, (Robert
Menzies), a dermatologist and social primitive, encounters Anna, by Dan's
contrivance, in an aquarium. They all fall in love: serial monogamy. Ah, the
nineties!

The characters are not likeable but the actors are. Menelaus
is subtle and magnetic as Anna, Chiappi plays Dan as the hopeless romantic,
Keddie is a perky Alice and Menzies is a suitably unpleasant and vulgar Larry.

The secrecy of guilty sex is attractive. These modern people
are easily bored or disillusioned. They crave their fantasies made real.

Designer, Judith Cobb's romantic blue moon looms over the
space that is piled with furniture echoing the temporary state of all four
relationships.

But Marber's people, despite several split ups and lots of
tears, never manage to gain our sympathy or elicit our compassion. They remain
shallow and lack warmth. The actors rattle around in the cavernous space as if
it is too huge to allow them to be intimate.

The problem is not in performances nor in Bruce Myles sleek
direction, but in the writing. The dialogue is often funny but never penetrates
the surface. They speak in glib phrases that alienate us. The narrative is
entertaining but thin. Marber places all dramatic moments off stage.

His history in stand-up comedy writing may keep Marber
distant from the personal. He is one of the international wave of young men who
have been too quickly promoted onto the mainstage.

His women.speak like men, almost as the mouthpiece for male
fantasies. The two men engage in a funny, grotesque internet sex chat, Dan
pretending to be a woman to tease his unwitting victim. The internet chat is
sexual in a pornographic, adolescent way. These days, we are unshockable.

Men's attitude to pornography is still the main lapse in
understanding between genders. Women speak a different language. Larry should
have guessed it was a man on the other end of his cyber fantasy. We hope all
men are not trapped in this phallo-centric stage.

Tuesday, 21 July 1998

People's lives bleed
into one another's, not necessarily by design, often by accident. They may
actually meet, intersect, even run parallel or simply reverberate, resemble or
echo each other. Six degrees of separation: we are all only six acquaintances
away from each other.

In Andrew Bovell's play, Speaking in Tongues, nine
characters played by four actors, share lives and even unwittingly share partners.
They plunge headlong or dip blithely into each other's world's only to damage
or abandon, perhaps to advise, reconcile or empathise. Whatever their
relationships, they speak different emotional languages, hence the title.

Bovell's writing is always crisp, stylish and witty. His
signature is the fracturing of time, space and dialogue. He splices several
scenes and locations, creating intersecting voices, echoes in one scene of
another, twanging ironic chords and reminding us that there are so few stories
in this little human world. We all suffer the same pains and joys.

In creating this text, he has cleverly merged two earlier
plays: Distant Lights from Dark Places and Like Whiskey on the Breath of a
Drunk You Love. Additional narrative, for those familiar with these or the
monologues from Confidentially Yours provides a further compelling back-story
for familiar characters. It is not simple storytelling. There are diversions
and detours at every turn.

Mills' Jane, a frightened fawn seeking change, is
counter-pointed by Bolton's tough Sonia. Owen's forceful copper, Leon, balances
not only his timid wife but his casual lover's sensitive, betrayed husband.
Power and weakness, betrayal and loyalty, deception and reconciliation pull
these characters together like magnets.

Bovell's dialogue plays with the fragmentation of everyday
communication and the actors balance superbly the vocal dynamic, interplay of
voices and roles, the canon effect of the dialogue and the cryptic emotional
landscape.

Strangers' life stories can be catalysts for change or
clarity. These characters are deeply affected by chance crossed paths. Leon
cannot forget the man whose lover never returned from Europe. Neil obsesses
about a stranger whose wife was stranded on a country road and disappeared.

There are some hiccups in this piece that may be due to the
collision of styles but it is a resonant and challenging peep into nine lives.

Tuesday, 14 July 1998

Who needs a design
with everything that opens and shuts, elaborate lighting, digital sound and a
ridiculous budget when you can see an impeccably written play performed by
three remarkable local actors in a shed?

Fiona Blair's interpretation of Faith Healer by Brian Friel
is such a production. The "shed" is a surprisingly warm and
comfortable portable classroom in the grounds of the VCA. Even if it were not,
this play would warrant enduring some discomfort.

Faith Healer uses the same narrative device as Friel's
recent play, Molly Sweeney that had a stellar season for the MTC. Three
characters speak in monologues. As their shared history unfolds, we become
complicit in each one's version of the facts. Events and their relationships
are coloured by their selective memories.

Irishman, Frank Hardy (Kurt Geyer), is a talented faith
healer with a chequered record. He travels Scotland and Wales with his
ex-lawyer wife, Grace (Jane Nolan) and his manager, the lovable ingenuous
cockney, Teddy (Richard Bligh).

The trio bump about the drizzly countryside in a rattle-trap
of a van fitted with a smelly primus stove, visiting remote villages and
presenting healing as an almost vaudevillian revue to rival Teddy's previous
client, Rob-Roy, the bag-piping whippet.

Several incidents are significant to all three. It takes two
and a half riveting hours of intimate contact with Frank, Grace and Teddy for
us to glean the truth about that village in the far north of Scotland where a
baby is buried, that Fred Astaire number they used for openers and that fateful
night in the pub in Ballybeg, Ireland

The marriage is fraught. Both Frank and Grace have abandoned
their families only to attempt belated reconciliations. Frank lives in a
fantasy world. Grace only wants devotion. Teddy stays twenty years on the road
with them because he loves both too much. They are victims of themselves and
each other. Artists should never marry. Says, Teddy. His whippet is proof
positive.

Blair has focused on the text and the actor, which is the
key to Friel's work. All three actors bring a detailed and intelligent eye to
the script, bringing alive the sub-text. Geyer is charming as the charismatic,
whiskey-soused Frank. Bligh is sweet and endearing as the poor doormat, Teddy.
Jane Nolan is heart-rending as the shattered Grace measuring her progress by
the hours she sleeps and the cigarettes she smokes.

Tuesday, 7 July 1998

If you are looking
for a cheap and novel lunch activity to interrupt your working or shopping day
in the city centre, look no further than the Athenaeum Theatre II on Collins
Street. While you watch a half-hour show, you can sup on soup provided by Heinz
and yummy bread donated by Pott's Bakery. All this for only $5.

Soup Kitchen Theatre began this terrific little earner eight
years ago and it has now been commandeered by another small company, Sat on the
Hat. The first show of this winter season is Cakes Men Like that will be
followed by Trudy Hellier's Trapped opening on August 4.

Cakes is a simple cautionary tale about housewifery in the
50's. This, of course, lends itself to satirical observations, songs from the
period and some slightly patronising commentary from our high-horse 90's.

Director Greg Dyson works with three women, Charlie Laidlaw,
Rosina Gannon and Amanda Armstrong, who portray three diverse characters who
are trapped in the never-ending cycle of pleasing the men in their lives with
their kitchen creativity.

The men invent appliances to make the lives of the women
easier but, in fact, they end up literally incarcerated in their fridges
singing Doris Day tunes, posing by the Frigidaire and telling their favourite
cake recipes. It is like a fractured 50's Women's Weekly advertisement.

The catch is that, occasionally, the women go completely
bonkers - inside their own heads. The pressure of being nice, providing for
hubbie and kids, and keeping up appearances, is all too much.

The three are performers and devisers of this light,
entertaining, if sometimes didactic piece. Laidlaw and Gannon are members of
the very clever clown ensemble, Four on the Floor who are known for very
physical comedy with sweet, wacky characters.

There is some of this style in Cakes but the pace is slower
and the comedy less punchy. It could benefit from a bit more action and a lot
less static talk. It is a dated style reminiscent of 70's feminist street
theatre that damned the housefraus and their over-bearing husbands.

The comparisons of men to the kind of cakes they like were
very funny. One tubby chap likes dumplings. Another eats meringue, "
Crusty on the outside, sweet and sticky inside." But their dream man is a
fruitcake. Rich, fruity and you can put him a way for a long time and he's even
better when he comes out.